In one aspect, operating system (OS) streaming is a technology to boot a computer (or a virtual machine) from an image file stored on a network. The actual operating system may be centrally located on a server and may stream to a client device on demand. In one aspect, such an image file may be sometimes referred to as a “virtual disk.”
Typically, a virtual disk created from a specific device can be streamed to multiple devices if they bear the same hardware characteristics. More specifically, the motherboard, the network adapter and the video card must be the same in this typical scenario. Being able to use a single virtual disk to boot multiple devices greatly simplifies information technology (IT) department's maintenance effort and cost. For example, to perform Windows updates, a system administrator only needs to apply the changes on the centrally located common virtual disk once. All client devices booted from this virtual disk will receive the changes.